by Arthur Foxake

A Washington Post article published in august 2014 revealed what the tech-savvy amongst us have known for a long time; that almost all recent cell phones can be located and tracked with the easily available and affordable technology. Software apps that interact with the GPS system can locate a handhold phone or portable computer within alarming accuracy from anywhere on the planet the globe are nothing new. Documents in the information published by former United States security agent Ed. Snowden last year made public the fact that the US National Security Agency (NSA) could, and did, gather data on all internet and cellular network traffic. There have since been rumours,as yet unconfirmed, that the NSA / CIA and other governments not only eavesdrop on many calls but also have a siftware 'kill' switch that could take individuals, groups of individuals or even entire networks down if it became politically expedient to do so.

According the Washington Post story, however, it is no longer only government agencies such as the NSA or UK counterpart, GCHQ (General Communications Headquarters), with their advanced technology and almost unlimited resources that may be carrying out such surveillance.

Craig Timberg wrote for the Washington Post that an inexpensive tracking system allowing a targeted device to be to be followed around the world. Inexpensive is a relative term, our research suggests this would be beyond the pocket of most individuals, but easily affordable for mid sized businesses.

"The technology works by exploiting an essential fact of all cellular networks: They must keep detailed, up-to-the-minute records on the locations of their customers to deliver calls and other services to them," Timberg reported.

Any Information Technology professional (such as Daily Stirrer founder Ian R Thorpe) knows how easy it is for surveillance systems to covertly collect these records and create a history of cellphone owners' movements over a period of time.

There are obvious privacy issues in that of people the world over, as we have plenty of evidence from the behaviour of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple that Corporate bosses are more than willing to play fast and loose with our civil rights and profit from selling illegally obtained private information on individuals.

To privacy campaigners and libertarians, this is a nightmare scenario.

"Any tin-pot dictator with enough money to buy the system could spy on people anywhere in the world,” Eric King, the deputy director of London-based privacy activist group Privacy International, said. "This is a huge problem."

It is a huge problem for governments as well. Berlin-based security consultant Tobias Engel commented. "It’s possible for almost anyone to track you as long as they are willing to spend some money on it."

And 'as any fule kno,' if people can do something with little chance of getting in trouble they will do it, not just governments but even more worryingly non-governments. If governments and corporations the world over are getting their hands on this technology, and the whereabouts of private individuals in the their homeland can be tracked without their knowledge, what sort of mischief can that facilitate.

Technology has developed at a rapid rate for the last half century, the lawmakers have not be able to keep up, how can they protect individuals against threats when those individuals or the law enforcement agencies cannot begin to understand the nature of the threat.

Launched with great fanfare from mainstream media and virtually no questioning voices, such is the fear generated in media circles by science Naziism, Jibo is billed as "the world's first family robot”.

A cheesy, overly sentimental video selling this machine explains exactly how it will spy on your entire family and report your activities to the manufacturers, national security agencies, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and anyone willing to shell out some money to invade your privacy (all for your own safety and protection of course) And it is extremely creepy. Read more >>>

Increased surveillance in Britain, along with the reduction of access to justice, have contributed to one of the worst assaults on human rights in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall, according to a damning assessment by Amnesty International.

In its annual State of the World’s Human Rights report published today, Amnesty says the Coalition had rushed through legislation such as anti-terror measures and invasive surveillance powers without adequate time for parliamentary debate. Read more >>>

On Monday, the human rights group Privacy International launched a campaign that will make it possible for people anywhere in the world to challenge covert spying operations involving Government Communications Headquarters(GCHQ), or the USA's National Security Agency.

In the few days since the launch, thousands of people have already signed up to join the unprecedented legal campaign against government mass surveillance programmes. Read more >>>

MPs: Snowden files are ‘embarrassing indictment’ of British spying oversight

One news story that has united left and right over the past year is the shock and horror felt by the world at the extent to which governments, particularly the US Government, have been using digital technology to spy on their own populations. This was first revealed in electronic documents leaked by former US Government security contractor Ed Snowden (now in exile in Russia) but the story has since been fleshed out by other revelations.

from The Guardian

A highly critical report by the Commons home affairs select committee published on Friday calls for a radical reform of the current system of oversight of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, arguing that the current system is so ineffective it is undermining the credibility of the intelligence agencies and parliament itself.
"Edward Snowden’s disclosures of the scale of mass surveillance are an embarrassing indictment of the weak nature of the oversight and legal accountability of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies", the committee of MPs concluded.

A highly critical report by the Commons home affairs select committee published on Friday calls for a radical reform of the current system of oversight of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, arguing that the current system is so ineffective it is undermining the credibility of the intelligence agencies and parliament itself.

The MPs say the current system was designed in a pre-internet age when a person's word was accepted without question. "It is designed to scrutinise the work of George Smiley, not the 21st-century reality of the security and intelligence services," said committee chairman, Keith Vaz. "The agencies are at the cutting edge of sophistication and are owed an equally refined system of democratic scrutiny. It is an embarrassing indictment of our system that some in the media felt compelled to publish leaked information to ensure that matters were heard in parliament."

Last Thursday the journal Science published an article by four MIT-affiliated data scientists (Sandy Pentland is in the group, and he’s a big name in these circles), titled “Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata”. Sounds innocuous enough, but here’s the summary from the front page WSJ article describing the findings:

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing Thursday in the journal Science, analyzed anonymous credit-card transactions by 1.1 million people. Using a new analytic formula, they needed only four bits of secondary information—metadata such as location or timing—to identify the unique individual purchasing patterns of 90% of the people involved, even when the data were scrubbed of any names, account numbers or other obvious identifiers.

Still not sure what this means? It means that I don’t need your name and address, much less your social security number, to know who you ARE. With a trivial amount of transactional data I can figure out where you live, what you do, who you associate with, what you buy and what you sell. I don’t need to steal this data, and frankly I wouldn’t know what to do with your social security number even if I had it … it would just slow down my analysis. No, you give me everything I need just by living your very convenient life, where you’ve volunteered every bit of transactional information in the fine print of all of these wondrous services you’ve signed up for. And if there’s a bit more information I need – say, a device that records and transmits your driving habits – well, you’re only too happy to sell that to me for a few dollars off your insurance policy. After all, you’ve got nothing to hide. It’s free money!

Almost every investor I know believes that the tools of surveillance and Big Data are only used against the marginalized Other – terrorist “sympathizers” in Yemen, gang “associates” in Compton – but not us. Oh no, not us. And if those tools are trained on us, it’s only to promote “transparency” and weed out the bad guys lurking in our midst. Or maybe to suggest a movie we’d like to watch. What could possibly be wrong with that? I’ve written a lot (here, here, and here) about what’s wrong with that, about how the modern fetish with transparency, aided and abetted by technology and government, perverts the core small-l liberal institutions of markets and representative government.

It’s not that we’re complacent about our personal information. On the contrary, we are obsessed about the personal “keys” that are meaningful to humans – names, social security numbers, passwords and the like – and we spend billions of dollars and millions of hours every year to control those keys, to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands of other humans. But we willingly hand over a different set of keys to non-human hands without a second thought.

Innocent until proved guilty has always been a basic principle of British and before the Union, English and Scottish justice. Since late in the ninth century when King Alfred signed into law the Liber Judicialis, the nearest thing England and Great Britain has ever had to a written constitution or, until recently ever needed, the presumption of innocence has stood.

Thinking of committing a crime cannot be a punishable offence, Philip K. Dick foresaw a world in which computers would predict who was going to commit crimes so that a preventative arrest could be made, but only in George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" has Thought Crime ever been a punishable offence.

Until now. Some people, those who are quick to yell "conspiracy theorist" when I or other dissidents refer to "the scientific dictatorship" or the "New World Order" (though we are only quoting the words of people with names like Rothschild, Rockefeller, Churchill, Bush, Kennedy, Kofi Annan, Giscard d'Estang, Henry Kissinger, Eisenhower, Clinton, Blair, Brown, Delors ... in fact read a compilation for yourselves ofNew World Order quotes.

Some warn against this new world order, this subsumation of democracy and individual freedom under a blanket of conformity demanded by scientists who promise by maiking us all into humandroids they can create an ordered, scientific society like the one depicted in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

What is really scary about the people leading this line of though is they have no intention of asking is if we are willing to become Slaves of the Machines, these left wing Nazi fellow travellers plan to impose it on us because they think we are too thick to understand that what is best for them (the elite) is good for we, the punters, who were born for servitude. How quaint that all their wailing and gnashing of teeth, all their ersatz campassions should mask attitudes so similar to that of Medieval Aristocrats.

Take a look at this and understand the nightmare these oligarchic collectivist shits have planned for you:

With revelations that the National Security Agency has collected some 20 trillion phone calls and emails via an expansive nationwide surveillance network, most Americans have already come to the realization that everything they do is being monitored.

But many shrug off Big Brother's prying eyes by suggesting that, since they aren't doing anything wrong, they have nothing to worry about.

That may have been true several years ago, but the digital surveillance systems of today are far more advanced than most people understand. No longer are these machines simply recording the data and storing them in some historical archive to be pulled at a later date should the government ever have reason to take a closer look at your personal life.' Continue reading

So it now goes beyond looking for keywords in emails, people saying things like "I effing hate Manchester United, I'd like to blow up Old Trafford," they are actively monitoring behaviour. Here's a little quote from deeper in the document (I know most of you are not going to read it all)

The algorithms being used don't just look for obvious keyword phrases associated with criminal activity like "I'm going to kill you” or "meet me later and we'll give him a beat down,” but focus in on routine activities, geo-location, and aggregate historical information to calculate the chance of a particular individual being involved in a crime at some point in the future.

Researchers at the University of Virginia demonstrated tweets could predict certain kinds of crimes if the correct analysis is applied.

A research paper published in the scientific journal Decision Support Systems last month said the analysis of geo-tagged tweets can be useful in predicting 19 to 25 kinds of crimes, especially for offenses such as stalking, thefts and certain kinds of assault.

The results are surprising, especially when one considers that people rarely tweet about crimes directly, said lead researcher Matthew Gerber of the university's Predictive Technology Lab.

Gerber said even tweets that have no direct link to crimes may contain information about activities often associated with them.

This is happening in the USA now but we know that British and UK mainstream political leaders are eager to follow down the same route. We have a chance to let them know what we think of their caring, sharing, minority loving Naziism in a few weeks. You know what to do. And if you need an extra nudge, watch this video:

According to a survey conducted for Le Figaro the day after the terrorist atrocity in Nice, 67 per cent of respondents said that they cannot trust President Hollande and his government to fight terrorism and protect citizens. This is a sharp decline in confidence in the government, in January 2016 the same survey showed that nearly one half of those surveyed trusted the government on matters of national security.

A staggering 99 per cent of respondents believe that the threat of attack is either “high” or “very high”, and half said France is at war, compared to 37 per cent in December 2015.

Mistrust of the executive was highest among people who vote Républicains and Front National, with just 17 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively, saying that they trust the government to effectively wage war on terrorists and Islamic extremism.

Confidence in the police, gendarmerie, and French intelligence services remains high at 84 per cent, the same ass in January 2015 immediately following the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Results also showed that 77 per cent believed the intelligence and security forces have insufficient powers to deal with terrorists, and 69 per cent said that the police and gendarmerie are not sufficiently staffed.

One significant conclusion from the dasta is that the French want to see , more extreme measures being used to combat Islamic terrorism, and would support a policy that gave precedence to national security over individuals’ freedoms. Eighty-one per cent of respondents were willing to accept more controls and limitations on their freedoms.

Sixty-eight per cent were favourable that those flagged as a threat to national security should not only be arrested but imprisoned. Those flagged on the French terror watch list, known as “Record S”, the “s” short for “Sûreté de l’État’ (State Security), allows for surveillance of suspects but is not immediate cause for arrest.

The French public believe members of terror cells are treated too leniently (88 per cent), while 91 per cent are in favour of a ‘life’ prison sentence that lasts the duration of the convicted person’s life without the possibility of sentence adjustment – even after thirty years’ imprisonment.

Jérôme Fourquet, director of Ifop, the French Institute of Public Opinion, who undertook the survey said of the strong sentiments expressed through the results: “In exceptional circumstances, there are exceptional responses. The attack in Nice has deeply marked people’s spirits and has reinforced the pre-existing views that France, at war with determined enemies, should authorise measures that the authorities had not considered before. ”

Mr. Fourquet went on to remark that the figures are at record level in the 15 years of the survey’s existence.

The post might appear from the headline to be aimed primarily as a US audience, but with US Government Surveillance now global, other governments sharing data with the NSA and The Internet sliding its tentacles into domestic appliances, cars and even the plumbing in our houses it affects us all.NSA Planning To Exploit 'Internet Of Things' Including Biomedical Devices

by Phil T Looker

Though the Marxist ideal of a centrally planned economy has been discredited everywhere both communist and socialist economic systems have been implemented with grat ballyhoo about fairness and equality, only to fail in chaos with the gap between rich and poor wider than ever and the poor reduced to penury. Both in theory and in practice, the notion of the all powerful central run by the academic and managerial class ought to have been completely buried. Most economists today would argue that the planned economy doesn't work, and in the last two decades of the twentieth century, almost all the planned economies in the world shifted toward market economics.

The authoritarian 'left' however are as determined as any religious fundamentalist sec when it comes to holding on to ideas that cannot be defended. With the development of new technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence, (plus a few things the fans of central planning and big government would rather not discuss openly, such as mass surveillance, science nerds, a breed that were always adept at deluding themselves, are starting to believe that - with the help these technologies - we can finally achieve a planned economy by means of mass digital surveillance and 'Big Data.'

In a recent speech, Jack Ma, one of China's most famous entrepreneurs and Founder and Chairman of Board of Alibaba Group and a bit of a cunt on the quiet, but aren't all internet billionaires, has expressed his optimism for the future recovery of the planned economy. He declares:

Over the past 100 years, we have always felt that the market economy is excellent, but in my opinion, in the next three decades will be a significant change, the planned economy will become increasingly large. Because we have access to all kinds of data, we may be able to find the invisible hand of the market. ... [I]n the age of data, it is like we have an X-ray machine and a CT machine for the world economy, so 30 years later there will be a new theory [on planned economy] out.

Well all nerds are control freaks, so Jack Ma's grand, romantic dream for humankind is nothing more than a dream, unless Ma has a plan to exterminate all humans outside the wealthiest ten per cent (phew, I just about scrape in) and employ robots and computers to do the work. That is an idea that has been discussed openly by the likes of Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, George H W (Pappy) Bush, Moon-face Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, HillBillary Clinton and many other wealthy elitists. These people are also keen on despicable ideas like Eugenics, the abolition of national sovereignty and imposition of a global culture and on social engineering to obliterate the races and create a uniform human of multi - ethnic ancestry. Thus I am not surprised to see that the idea of a centrally controlled economy is still quite attractive to social elites such as Jack Ma. It is no crazier than the rest of the bullshit ideologies dreamed up in the safe spaces of university faculties.

It is true, to some extent, that with the development of technologies, central planners now can obtain more data and information, and their ability to analyze these data and the information is greatly enhanced as well. Moreover, in the foreseeable future, those skills will be further enhanced. Ma believes a planned economy can be achieved in the future precisely because of his companies, Taobao and Alipay, are ubiquitous in the areas of e-commerce and payment in China and therefore can collect an enormous amount of consumption data. To Jack Ma himself and other "technical socialists," such data could be the cornerstone of the operation of the planned economy.

However, if we look at this more closely, we realize the big data that will enable them to succeed where Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Castro, Pol Pot are merely:

(1) data based on real deals of the past, which can not be used to predict the consumer preferences in the future;

(2) data obtained using questionnaires, which can not reflect the real demonstrated preferences of customers.

In reality then, the best the dazzling new technologies can offer the wannabe controllers of the Brave New World can is still a guess at what the real world is like, a mirage, a chimera.

Those who consider the previous failures of socialism as merely a failure of information have failed to understand that the core problem of socialism's centrally managed society lies in the absence of an algorithm to predict supply and demand and thus prices in the planned economy. The role of prices in the market economy is unique because money prices offer an indispensable tool in economic calculation.

Therefore, even though we have some excellent data already, without the need to surveil the activities of every human being on the planet, without this event and mood driven market-price mechanism, neither the economic calculation nor the efficient allocation of resources is possible.

The other problem with Big Data (and I have work with data collection and analysis) is that
data alone is not enough. You have to be able to correctly read the
story coming out of the data, as opposed to making the data fit your
story.

Further, data alone does not provide the accountability that comes
with a free market. When someone is mismanaging funds, eventually they
run out, and cannot waste any more money. When a central planner
mismanages resources (probably to achieve some utopian fantasy like a single human race), he can
always tax more, until absolutely everything has been ruined.